How Trump’s Child Care Plan Fails the Working-Class Voters Who Elected Him

Ivanka Trump might say she is all about families and their child care needs, but if a new analysis released today by the progressive policy think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP) tells us anything, it's that her father's administration isn't doing much for the families of the very people who voted for him.

As the analysis shows, in swing counties won by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race, a typical family of four with two young children would only net an additional $5.55 a year under the Trump plan after spending an average of $6,037 per year on child care. The reason this benefit to working- and middle-class families is so staggeringly low: The Trump child care proposal is nothing more than a tax credit based on the assumption that all families can afford to pay the full cost of child care out of pocket, then hope for a refund the following year. A tax-credit-based plan only really helps wealthy Americans who can afford to spend more on child care and thus receive bigger tax credits for that care. Case in point: The average benefit under the Trump plan for a typical family of four with two young children living on the Upper East Side in Manhattan would be $7,329.

"When Trump released his proposal for child care back in September, we knew it was regressive and would primarily benefit people like him," Katie Hamm, the Vice President of Early Childhood Policy at the Center for American Progress, tells Allure. "If folks voted for Trump thinking he would address their needs as low- and middle-income families through his child care plan, this analysis shows that it wasn't really designed to do so."

Rasheed Malik, a policy analyst on CAP's Early Childhood Policy team, confirms that many Trump voters in swing counties struggle to afford care, and that their needs are ignored by Trump's proposed plan. He says CAP first identified the swing counties that supported Trump in 2016 much more strongly than they had supported Mitt Romney in 2012, finding that Trump received particular support in rural and small-town areas in Appalachia, upstate New York, and the Northern Great Plains (which helped solidify his wins in Iowa and Pennsylvania). In those game-changing regions, the median income for a family with two young kids and in which both parents work is about $68,500 a year. Spending an average of $6,037 a year on child care means these families spend about 10 percent of their pre-tax earnings on child care, or 12 to 15 percent of their take-home pay. The Trump plan, Malik says, "doesn't really do anything for these families" and is "only beneficial if you're spending way more than the average family does on child care" — which these families just can't afford to do.

That's why Hamm says that "it's a lot of smoke and mirrors" when Trump and members of his administration talk about helping working class families and "empowering women." "There's a lot of rhetoric about helping working people and people in areas that have been economically depressed for a long time, but if you look at the actual policies, it just doesn't add up," she says. "You hear him talk about helping these families, but this isn't a child care plan he's proposed — it's a tax windfall for the wealthy dressed up as a child care plan."

Hamm says a proposal that would most benefit low- and middle-income families would ensure that these families get financial support not just at year's end, but bi-weekly or monthly: That's when their bills are due. A viable plan would also support access to affordable, regulated, high-quality care programs and higher wages for the people providing this care. Given that 65 percent of children under six have all parents in the workforce, she flags these priorities as especially urgent. "Women are increasingly the breadwinners and are critical to the economic lives not just of their own families, but to the economy as a whole," she says. "You can't grow the economy and the labor force without child care. It doesn't add up. If parents don't have child care, they can't go to work."